Failure is no fun.

“Data Violates Integrity Constraints” is an error I encounter too often. If you get this error, perhaps this post will help you push past your failure.

In the scenario below, you try to import excel data through a data entity, but get a failure error.

That’s fine you say, I’m a professional. So you click view execution log to troubleshoot the issue.

If you try to view the staging data, you’ll see no staging data has loaded.
If you click on Staging log details, you’ll get a curious error message:
The data value violates integrity constraints.

This is curious, because it seems you haven’t loaded any data at all, let alone some data that would have triggered a validation error. You re-check your excel file, and the data you wanted to load seems correct.

So What’s The Problem? How do you fix it?

Frequently, the issue is there are some “blank” rows at the bottom of your excel data that are throwing off the upload. Data Management is trying to prevent you from importing those blank rows. Highlight the row below your data, press CTRL+SHIFT+DOWN and delete all the rows below your data. To be safe, you can do the same thing to the far right to clean up any columns that may be causing trouble as well.

Then, just like wherever else we encounter failure, set it up and try, try again.

Good luck!